Antagonista Manifesto

"When injustice becomes law,resistance becomes duty."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" -- Mario Savio

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?

Welcome to Anything that defies my sense of reason.... Class antagonism of a New World Order.

....because words will always retain their power, offer the means to meaning and, for those who'll listen, the enunciation of truth, and because being sleepwalked into fascism is not an option.

To confront ideas that radically alter our perception of the world is one of life's most unsettling yet liberating experiences.

Throw away your ambitions for membership to the socially acceptable position of wage slave.

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers." -- Article 19

Words of Wisdom

"Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem." - Howard Zinn

"If the truth can be told in a way so as to be understood, it will be believed." - Terence McKenna

"The eternal fight is not many battles fought on one level but one great battle fought on many different levels." - The Antagonist

"Besides, I think it's time to abolish politicians entirely and let everbody participate in self-government via Internet. We needed representatives in the 18th Century, because we couldn't all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our "representatives" have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don't need "representatives" anymore; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves." - Robert Anton Wilson

"There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but, in the end, they always fall - think of it. Always." - Mohandas Gandhi

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in times of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy. Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Expedience asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And a time comes when man must take a stand that’s neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it’s right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face." — Michel Foucault

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world." — Octave Mirbeau

"We have given away far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now it's time to take some back." - John le Carre

“We need to work like the Zapatistas do, like ants who go everywhere no matter which political party the other belongs to. Zapatistas proved people can work together in spite of differences.” - Anna Esther Cecena of the FZLN (Mexican support committee of the Zapatistas)

"Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance." - Albert Einstein

"The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you." - Immortal Technique

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." - Stephen Bantu Biko

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it." - Mohandas Gandhi

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought". - John F. Kennedy

"There is no general legal duty to assist the police or to obey police instructions." - Rice v Connolly [1966] 2 QB 414

"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you... then you win." - Mohandas Gandh

"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance." - Leonard Schapiro

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” - Benjamin Franklin

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Dr. Martin Luther King

"There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress." - Howard Zinn

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." - George Orwell

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the virtue nor the wisdom to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; And to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." - PJ Proudhon

Public Private Partnership

26 June 2005

There's a discussion evolving over at Nerve Centre about the alleged cannabis/psychosis link for which The Antagonist penned an amended version of the following:

Without getting into the discussion about how 'psychosis' is defined, who defines it, and whose purpose that definition serves, modern life, urban living, and the almost entire removal of the human animal in Western society from anything that vaguely resembles its natural environment is what is causing dramatically increased rates of psychosis, and there exists plenty of evidence to support this notion.

If any link existed between cannabis and psychosis, the legends and customs of cannabis use, or the use of any other psychoactive plant throughout the ages, would not have survived the same Millennia of evolution that is beyond the bounds of acceptable discussion for those which seek to legislate against our natural right to use nature's plants.

We must look to how debate of such things is shaped. For example, the following link appears fairly innocuous at first glance:

Notice how the information about mushrooms, fungi which grow naturally all over the world and which have also been used by humans since time immemorial, is presented in the 'Crime Section' of the BBC's 'A-Z of Drugs'.

Of course, we all already know 'drugs are bad, period', and entirely criminal, except for the ones the pharmaceutical industry sells us at every available opportunity - Headache? Tired? Can't Sleep? Can't stay awake? Too fat? Too thin? Cough? Cold? Ache? Pain? Anxious? Stressed? Depressed? Etc, and from which the government makes a nice tidy sum.

The implicit suggestion in the presentation of the information alone is that mushrooms are drugs and that it is a crime to consume them.

In fact, the consumption of mushrooms, cannabis, or any psychoactive plant is just the human animal exercising its natural right to interact with its natural environment in whichever natural way it sees fit to ensure its continued survival and wellbeing. Continued survival and wellbeing is the sole instinctive objective of all life-forms and man, mushrooms and cannabis have happily and peacefully coexisted for thousands upon thousands of years.

Moreover, all of this goes back to the days when we foraged for food, communicated without words, and built monolithic stone pyramids so tall that we had to wait a few thousand years for the Eiffel Tower to be built to surpass them in height.

What we are left with is the dichotomy of governments removing the rights of citizens to use natural substances which we know have been used for thousands of years to expand consciousness, while simultaneously selling them nice taxable, synthetic 'medication', along with other substances which we conveniently forget are also mind altering drugs such as alcohol (stupefying and violent), caffeine (poor man's cocaine, the go-faster drug of choice for the capitalist society), and nicotine (scream if you wanna go faster).

Whatever one's stance on drugs, it is impossible to reconcile the antitethic practice of condemning the natural plants of the earth from which life as we know it emerged, and the natural remedies which we could all cultivate for ourselves, in favour of taxable, profitable, synthetic alternatives beyond the means of our production and that require chemical factories, laboratories and government licenses to produce.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that through payment of taxes and TV license fees, we are funding the very mis-information campaigns that lead to our deliberate confusion. And, if we chose to stop paying those taxes and TV license fees to stop all the misinformation, they would throw us in jail. Interesting, non?

"That which does not kill us, only makes us stronger."

If psychoactive plants can be consumed (they can) and do not kill us (they don't, unless you're incredibly stupid to start with) then it follows that they only make us stronger (they do).

The evidence of what we once knew is everywhere if only we are able to recognise it for what it is.

5 comments:

This is a superb article - congrats to the author for eloquently stating the facts therein. I would just like to add that the role of synthetic drugss in our quests to widen our horizons should not be overlooked. Although initially promoted and tested on volunteers by a CIA run initiative, LSD played a pivotal role in shaping the outlook of my generation, as has MDMA (main active ingredient in ecstacy tabs) done for the younger generation. Those of us who seek to find more within and without (!) ourselves sometimes may go up a dead end street - crack and heroin spring to mind, but we live (and just a few occasionally die) to learn by our successes and our mistakes.Sad to see this blog's been up nearly a year and I'm the first to post a comment. Ah well, we do lead such busy lives, easily becoming trapped by the master plot to keep us all controlled. I myself am no different - with a hectic unwanted lifestyle struggling just to stand still!Peace & Love,Red Steve.

Interesting points about the synthetic drugs. Terrence McKenna often referred to MDMA as being one of the vital components of the Rave Culture of the nineties as a lead-in to the archaic revival. To my mind though, natural is always the preferable option.

As always, education is the answer, not misinformation, but misinformation and mindless propaganda are what capitalism and economies thrive on.

On a related note.... Last year the British government dumped mushrooms in the Class A category, along with heroin and crack, but excluded from this re-classification the Fly Agaric or Amanita Muscaria, which is often referred to as either one of the most toxic varieties of mushroom, or the Divine Mushroom of Immmortality, depending on what you're reading.

In my original article is a picture of popes and Fly Agarics which shows the similarities between the Divine Mushrooms of Immortality and the regalia of popes.

What this leaves us with is a bunch of people who dress up like Fly Agarics for fun, and then go on to render illegal mushrooms that don't look like them (i.e. Lords or Popes). They might as well have called it the 'My Mushroom is Better Than Yours Bill' for the ridiculous piece of Class based legislation that it is.

And, in all of this you have the explanation for quite why all magic mushrooms have been made illegal in the UK, except for the Divine Mushroom of Imortality, the most 'toxic' mushroom of the lot, the Fly Agaric.

The sad thing about all this is that one of nature's most enlightening plants, revered throughout the ages, has for quite some time been representative of the class antagonisms of Religions, States and Governments.

This is a phase in which humanity has to confront with all these kinds of substance and take what it's good and right into account and into human evolution. That will only happen as a natural reaction of the results of human consumption and affection to a substance.

When taking a science program at UBC in Vancouver two different seemingly unrelated courses gave insight to our evolutionary mutation process.One is that we, meaning humans descend from stardust seeded to new earth as the primordial soup gestated into life. From germ/bacterial beginnings we grew from simple amino protein whose cousins where slime mould or fungi.

The natural world and humans have the same springboard of life, we are interconnected by the very elements that dusted the earth with our early anscestors.

We were created to sense and actualize the magic and mystery of life, and it was hardwired into the seeds of life.

Wikepedia: source of first two paragraphs

Cannabinoids are a group of terpenophenolic compounds present in Cannabis (Cannabis sativa L). The broader definition of cannabinoids refer to a group of substances that are structurally related to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or that bind to cannabinoid receptors. The chemical definition encompasses a variety of distinct chemical classes: the classical cannabinoids structurally related to THC, the nonclassical cannabinoids, the aminoalkylindoles, the eicosanoids related to the endocannabinoids, 1,5-diarylpyrazoles, quinolines and arylsulphonamides and additional compounds that do not fall into these standard classes but bind to cannabinoid receptors.[1] The term cannabinoids also refers to a unique group of secondary metabolites found in the cannabis plant, which are responsible for the plant's peculiar pharmacological effects. Currently, there are three general types of cannabinoids: herbal cannabinoids occur uniquely in the cannabis plant; endogenous cannabinoids are produced in the bodies of humans and other animals; and synthetic cannabinoids are similar compounds produced in a laboratory.

Cannabinoid receptorsMain article: cannabinoid receptorBefore the 1980's, it was often speculated that cannabinoids produced their physiological and behavioral effects via nonspecific interaction with cell membranes, instead of interacting with specific membrane-bound receptors. The discovery of the first cannabinoid receptors in the 1980s helped to resolve this debate. These receptors are common in animals, and have been found in mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. There are currently two known types of cannabinoid receptors, termed CB1 and CB2.

CB1 receptors are found primarily in the brain, specifically in the basal ganglia and in the limbic system, including the hippocampus. They are also found in the cerebellum and in both male and female reproductive systems. CB1 receptors are essentially absent in the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain stem that is responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular functions. Thus, there is not a risk of respiratory or cardiovascular failure as there is with many other drugs. CB1 receptors appear to be responsible for the euphoric and anticonvulsive effects of cannabis. CB2 receptors are almost exclusively found in the immune system, with the greatest density in the spleen. CB2 receptors appear to be responsible for the anti-inflammatory and possibly other therapeutic effects of cannabis.

Very good Antagonist, except as ever it's complete tosh. You've followed your usual formula of taking a small issue and bringing in all sorts of wider unrelated stuff without substantiatng your claims about the smaller issue. This is the easiest and laziest way to convince people of an argument.

Yeah, cannabis is fine and the fascists just want to contol us, man, and people only get ill but it's the state making us ill really, man.

Speak to doctors about cannabis psychosis Antagonist and they will be happy to inform you about what they see in their surgeries every day. But then I suppose in your eyes they're part of the conspiracy, aren't they? See what I mean? If your argument is based on lambasting the whole system, then you have the luxury of never having to bother to corroborate anything you say.

My best friend used to be a successful, outgoing, popular, happy person before he started smoking a lot of cannabis. He now resides in a mental institute. Not because the state made him like that Antagonist; because cannabis did. When I go to visit him, he just stares at me blankly. It's tragic.

Not only are you deeply misinformed about most of what you have to say, but you are also highly irresponsible. The one downside of the internet is that it gives fools like you a platform.

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Antagonista Zeitgeist

"The country's biggest force, the Metropolitan police || believe that large sections of the population have become increasingly politicised, and there is a growing sense that the current restrictions on demonstrations are too light." - The Guardian

"The bombers scattered identity and bank cards around the Tube carriages they targeted before placing their rucksacks on the floor and setting off the explosives. || Although they were damaged to some extent, they [the ID and bank cards] did not show the damage that would be expected if they were on the body of the bomber or in the rucksack, suggesting that in each case they had been deliberately separated by some distance from the actual explosion. || The bombers were not wearing the rucksacks at the time of the explosions, but had instead put them down on the floor of the bus and Tube trains." - The Telegraph

"But it [de Menezes execution MPS trial] was nearly derailed after an armed police raid on the home of a juror's ex-boyfriend in the second week of the case, in which the female juror's baby was taken away." - Daily Mail

"It is no exaggeration to say that at the time of the arrest there was not one shred of admissible evidence against Barot. The arrest was perfectly lawful - there were more than sufficient grounds, but in terms of evidence to put before a court, there was nothing. There then began the race against time to retrieve evidence from the mass of computers and other IT equipment that we seized. It was only at the very end of the permitted period of detention that sufficient evidence was found to justify charges. I know that some in the media were sharpening their pencils, and that if we had been unable to bring charges in that case, there would have been a wave of criticism about the arrests. Barot himself of course eventually pleaded guilty last year and received a 40-year sentence." – DAC Peter Clarke

The 7/7 narrative: "06.49: The 4 men .... each put on rucksacks || 07:14: .... The 4 then put on their rucksacks...." More....

"The [21/7] jury were told a further charge of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life, faced by each man, was now being left off the indictment." – BBC

"Tony Blair and his family suffered the indignity of having to sleep on the floor and eat an Indian takeaway out of foil cartons on their last night in Downing Street, insiders have revealed." – The Times